Editor's Note

The Charge

"In October of 1994 three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods
near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary…A year later
their footage was found."

The Case

The Blair Witch Project (Blu-ray) was simply never going to be my bag
because I couldn't suspend my disbelief. Barring serious injury, there's just
very little chance to get seriously lost in the woods of the Eastern United
States. Just pick a direction (preferably South and East so you don't end up in
Canada) and start walking. Eventually, you will hit civilization, or maybe a
road or a river you can follow. Spooky shenanigans or not, I simply couldn't
feel anything for the obviously brain-dead protagonists of The Blair Witch
Project because they managed to get lost in good weather with plenty of food
by basically being jerks to one another. Combine that crappy behavior with some
(to me) unspooky effects, like those little wooden doll things, and there was
nothing to really keep me interested.

Let's face it, though: The Blair Witch Project is and was a cultural
juggernaut, bowling over opposition like the characters kicked over those rock
formations. It's pretty much been enshrined as The Exorcist of its generation, and
like that film has been ripped off, parodied, and referenced in the decade since
its release. A little over ten years since its first theatrical run, The
Blair Witch Project is being given the hi-def treatment, with mixed
results.

For those of you in hiding who somehow managed to miss hearing about this
film, The Blair Witch Project purports to be a collection of footage
found after a trio of filmmakers went missing. This trio went into the woods to
investigate the elusive "Blair Witch." As the footage shows, strange
things start happening, and the trio battles the elements, the Witch, and
themselves for survival.

Say what you want about The Blair Witch Project, whether you think
it's a brilliant example of indie filmmaking or a nausea-inducing pile of crap,
it did get one spectacular thing right: movie marketing. The film was released
in 1999, before the dot-com bubble burst, before a significant percentage of the
population had Internet-enabled smart phones in their pocket, in fact before
sites like Facebook had even drawn a significant portion of the population
online. Leveraging a web presence that fed into a Sci-Fi Channel
"documentary," the film rode the fact/fiction "is it real"
line straight to box office gold. This is precisely why The Blair Witch
Project succeeded where other reality horror films failed (with the
exception of Paranormal
Activity, which wisely also utilized a viral marketing strategy to stimulate
interest in the fact/fiction question).

This marketing campaign (and the film's shaky cam stylings) had an
unintended effect: The Blair Witch Project tends to be a
love-it-or-hate-it sort of film. Yet time has been fairly kind to the film,
especially in light of the torrent of horrible parodies. It now plays more like
an interesting experiment than a horror film in the strictest sense. The
Blair Witch Project almost singlehandedly created a new sub-genre that
simultaneously pointed the way to other kinds of movies (like the YouTube
aesthetic), while also sealing itself off by accomplishing its task so well that
no one could follow the film effectively.

The film was released on DVD just as the format was really growing legs, and
it's had a pretty decent run in standard def. For this Blu-ray release, we get
an almost superfluous audiovisual upgrade and the same extras we've seen before.
The disc includes a 1.33:1 AVC encoded transfer that definitely shows all the
details in the original film, but since it was intended to look like crappy
amateur footage, that's not saying much. The DTS-HD lossless stereo track is
similar, in that it's a full-on hi-def upgrade of sound that was captured to
sound bad. There's nothing really wrong with these elements; it's more that the
film was intended to be somewhat low-tech, which is at odds with the digital
sheen of Blu-ray.

Extras include the previously available director/producer commentary, a
couple of featurettes on the making of the film, some "discovered"
footage, and four "never-before-seen" alternate endings that continue
the creepiness.

I hope I've made it clear that while I don't like the The Blair Witch
Project, I respect it. For this reason, I'd love to see the film get the
kind of treatment it really deserves, both as a film and as a marketing
phenomenon. I have dreams of a Criterion release of the film that would include
all the previously available material along with new documentaries on the film's
effect on pop culture, packaged in a classy way that ties in with the film's
aesthetic and use of viral marketing. Though this Blu-ray edition of the film is
fine, the definitive edition of the film has yet to be released.

I'm a real heathen, one of those people who on any given day would just as
soon watch Book of Shadows as the original Blair Witch film, but
even I can't deny the film's impact and staying power. This Blu-ray disc
probably isn't worth an upgrade for most fans, but it's a great way for a new
generation to discover what the fuss was all about.